Introduction: It has been two years
since we first visited the team at Tackle Warehouse and since that time the
company has grown a great deal both in terms of total product offering as well
as moving into a new state of the art facility to keep up with their fast paced
growth. We head back down to San Luis Obispo, CA for a behind the scenes look at
the new and improved Tackle Warehouse.

A little history:
Long time readers will remember our last trip to Tackle Warehouse when we met up
with Rich Zeilenga, one of the founders of Tackle
Warehouse, and he gave us a tour of his current operation as well as the
new facility being constructed which would become the new home of Tackle
Warehouse.

The new Tackle Warehouse building
dwarfs their previous facility

Rich focused his attention
on bass tackle first because of the ability to reach a broad audience not just
in the US, but internationally. He also wanted to make sure that no matter what
size they were that they delivered better service to customers, whether that was
through having the right products, getting orders out quickly or service after
the sale. With this basic idea Rich approached the owner’s of Tennis Warehouse,
Drew Munster and Mark Sczbecki the nation’s largest distributor of tennis
products.

This building is now home to a
family of brands

Being an angler himself
Drew liked the proposal and Tackle Warehouse was born. We won’t go into the
humble beginnings of the operation again but suffice to say that Tackle
Warehouse started in a tiny local shop and has outgrown their facilities three
times already.

Rich Zeilenga the founder of TW in
front of the new retail storefront

When we toured the new
facility in 2008 it was still under construction and was little more than a
shell full of metal beams and leftover shelving. Rich showed us where the new
retail store would eventually be as well as the area that would make up the
warehouse. It was somewhat hard to visualize exactly how the final facility
would look and we were eager to see just how well the plan had been realized on
this trip.

Going back two years to that same
spot...

The new facility was just
across the field from their old facility but absolutely dwarfs it in size and
scale. A number of the “Warehouses,” including Tackle Warehouse, Tennis
Warehouse and Running Warehouse are all now integrated into one corporate
facility.